Monday, May 29, 2006

Mailbag roundup

Running a comedic weblog is not without its hazardous side. I’ve received a few letters in the last week which border on the nasty. This one, for instance:

Dear F Eater

Your lack of a cohesive identity would be hilarious were it not so tragic. Like so many blogs spawned by that of the inimitable Harry Hutton, you started out no doubt intending to post pithy contributions every few days, incorporating humorous and occasionally surreal observations on life and in the process amassing a fanatical fan base of witty, erudite followers who lap up your every ejaculation. Again like so many others, you appear to have run out of steam once your initial creativity burned itself out, and now resort to disparate postings of wildly uneven quality with no trace of a unifying theme. Those comments which are appended to your posts are by people who feel sorry for you and who feel obliged to reciprocate as you continue desperately to comment on their own sites, toadying lickspittle that you are.

Yours sincerely

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

[I’ve censored the name on legal advice but a quick click on each of the links on my list will make it obvious who sent this]

To which I can only reply: ‘Initial creativity’? I started this blog in the middle of a creative slump, you hound, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Somebody calling itself Lord Byron’s Crapper writes:

Dear Mr Food Eater

Why do you persist with posting those stories of yours? A few people skim through them out of a sense of duty but really, they’re just a waste of valuable bandwidth, aren’t they? Do you know how many starving children in the Third World could be fed in the time it takes to read your tortuously-constructed prose?

While this one, written in green ink, arrived yesterday:

Dear Eater

Your pedantry marks you out as somebody with very little ultimately to say, but quite ready to criticise others who take the time and trouble to offer their thoughts (ha! I spelled ‘their’ correctly, as ‘their’ and not ‘there’ or ‘they’re’, so don’t even go there) for the web community to read. Having said that, anyone would be mad if they [sic] were bothered by your opinion anyway. I’m not.

Regards,

The Anti-Pedant

My reply, could I be I bothered to send one, would point out the dangling participle in the penultimate sentence.

Finally, in what’s been a grim week, Fish Food opined:

dear foot eater

next youll be making a really self pitying navel gazing post about the trials of being a blogger in order to build up a critical mass of comments like you did when you disappeared for a couple of weeks. you attention seeking fraud you.

So now you write hate mail to yourself, Footsie, eh? Fairly ingenious, I have to say. But there's a certain stylistic uniformity in most of them (except for the half-hearted attempt at sub-literacy in the last one), which prompts me to think you're the source of this bizarre attempt at jocular self-flagellation. Or is it 'jocose'? 'Jocund,' perhaps? What the hell, I'll just go with the Anglo-Saxon 'playful.'

But I am no less puzzled, I must say. I know you have a girlfriend (hope she's not the mere progeniture of your feverish imagination); I also suspect you're some sort of doctor, busily healing humankind from its own foolishness and all that. So: can you possibly be that bored out of your skull that you're now concocting vituperative missives to your own ennuyed self?